Distance: 5.1 miles
Difficulty of the terrain: medium
Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the gpx. file from Dropbox
Circular walk in the suburbs of Northampton starting from the town’s railway station and heading to Hunsbury Hill Country Park, a deeply historic site, where a significant Iron Age hillfort at the heart of a Victorian controversy, lies.
The Story
Route Notes
Getting Back
John Lubbock’s Law’s Last Stand
Hunsbury Hill is a large country park in the midst of Northampton’s south west suburbs.
It is heavily wooded, and strikingly the hill itself is not especially prominent, a slight rise at best amidst the generally gently hilly landscape of western Northamptonshire.
The park is most famous locally for its narrow gauge railway, essentially a leisure attraction, but also a heritage piece, a relic of when similar railways crisscrossed the county, serving the ironstone and other quarries which were – well within living memory – one of Northamptonshire’s primary industries.
Hunsbury Hill’s narrow gauge railway, a legacy of its past as an ironstone quarry, also points to the reason for its national renown, the presence at the centre of the park of a large iron age hillfort, concealed amongst trees, which comprises multiple tall defensive embankments and ditches.
These earthworks are a remarkable survival, lying amidst a major urban area, and one which was extensively quarried.
The story of how the hillfort known as Hunsbury Fort, or sometimes Danes Camp, a reference to the vikings who reached as far west as Northampton from the North Sea by sailing up the River Nene, survived, stems back to a late Victorian controversy.
As early as 1873 John Lubbock MP, later the 1st Baron Avebury, who was a banker, Liberal politician and keen student of the ancient British past, promoted a law for the protection of ancient monuments. By the 1870s the UK was fairly unique amongst European countries in offering no legal protection to designated sites of antiquarian or historical interest and Lubbock’s bill sought to remedy this.
The major sticking point in passing the law was that Lubbock sought the power for the government to compulsory purchase, and then maintain, ancient monuments. This to many of his peers was completely unacceptable state interference in private property and an undue claim upon public resources, so each attempt to pass the law was voted down.
It was amidst an attempt to pass the law in 1882 that Hunsbury Hill became a cause celebre for early conservationists.
Many of the 26 ancient monuments across 10 counties proposed to be scheduled under the law, were in remote agricultural regions like Derbyshire’s Arbor Low, Nine Ladies and Minninglow Hill, where there was no great economic incentive to damage or destroy them. Hunsbury Hill, by contrast, lay on the edge of rapidly expanding Northampton, and upon a seam of valuable ironstone. The owner of the site was intending to opening a quarry which had the potential to erase all trace of the site.
A final attempt was made to secure Hunsbury Hill in an unquarried state for the nation, however, it was voted down enabling iron stone extraction, which continued at the site until the early 1920s to commence in 1883. The ironstone was processed to feed the furnaces at the ironworks established beside the nearby canal and the Northampton and Blisworth Railway, which had opened in 1873.
But while stone was quarried from inside the hillfort enclosure, revealing rich troves of Iron Age artefacts which in an early example of rescue archeology were bestowed upon Northampton Museum where they can be viewed to this day, Hunsbury Hill was added to the schedule of ancient monuments when Lubbock’s bill passed in 1882.
Adding Hunsbury Hill to the schedule meant that while the owner could still quarry around the Iron Age ramparts they could not remove them to access the ironstone ensuring that the outline of hillfort survived and can be viewed today. A compromise which is fairly typical of a lot of the UK’s early heritage protection law. Following the passage of Lubbock’s bill as the Ancient Monuments Protection Act of 1882, the initial schedule of ancient monuments was soon expanded, with further legislation by the early 1900s adding an inspector on ancient monuments, and eventually a Royal Commission on Historic Monuments in England (the ancestor of today’s English Heritage and Historic England), as well as spurring the development of quasi-private parliament backed conservation initiatives like the National Trust which was established in its earliest form in 1895.
Following the closure of the ironstone quarries on Hunbury Hill in the 1920s, following the closure of the ironworks in 1921, amidst a post First World War slump in demand for metals with the railway which served them following in 1930, after which the site returned to agricultural use. The railway equipment was later reused elsewhere in Northampton as the ironstone industry moved to extract new seams of the resource. The site remained rural until 1970, as part of the great boom in creating country parks, Northamptonshire County Council turned 38 hectares, with the hillfort at its heart into a country park to serve rapidly growing Northampton. Part of the site’s industrial railway network was then restored along the original trackbed in 1972 creating the heritage railway which runs through part of the park to this day.
The ancient hillfort, vikings, and the Victorian controversy around quarrying for ironstone amidst a scheduled ancient monument are not the only notable historical events associated with the hill. Gruesomely the site of the fort was sometimes used for executions in the early modern period due to its distinctive location near the Northampton assizes. Most infamous amongst the executions was that of Mrs. Lucas of Moulton who was burnt at the stake in 1631 for poisoning her husband.
Route Notes
Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox
This walk was created using Ordnance Survey Explorer. To subscribe and also get Ordnance Survey Maps on your phone, click the banner above.
This circular walk from Northampton town centre to Hunsbury Hill Country Park’s iron age hillfort begins from Northampton Railway Station.
Upon exiting the station down the steps at the front turn right walking along the A4500 through the Northampton suburb of St. James End. The neighbourhood is dominated by the tall, thin National Lift Tower, which looms over it.
Soon you reach a junction where you take the left hand fork.
Then soon on your left, just past a small 1970s vintage district shopping centre you turn left down a cul-de-sac past some low rise blocks of flats, and then along a short road lined with terraced houses of mixed vintage.
Past the houses you walk straight ahead across a car park, passing through a gate, to reach the side of a recently constructed link road which connects business parks, warehouses, factory units and new housing estates.
You cross the road here and follow a well worn path through some scrub land, left for nature conservation, until you reach the side of the link road again.
Here you cross picking up a path which runs straight ahead, paralleling the road, through the Storton’s Pits Nature Reserve which is managed by the Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire Wildlife Trust.
Emerging from the nature reserve, you turn right, heading around a blue shed housing part of the Cleveland Cable Company, before heading down the very quiet Duston Mill Lane to cross the River Nene.
On the far side of the Nene you follow a tarmac path over a series of former canals and drainage channels, crossing marshy land, and finally the Grand Union Canal to finally reach a road along the edge of a modern housing estate that leads up to a busy roundabout.
Taking care, as there is no pavement, and the traffic heavy, walk around the roundabout heading right, until you come to a narrow road, overhung with trees, with signs for Hunsbury Parish.
Turn right here and walk uphill until you approach a roundabout at the top of the hill, where taking care, you cross the road and head to the left along a road through a 1980s vintage housing estate.
Soon on your right you come to a snicket between a mobile phone mast and a primary school which leads you into Hunsbury Hill Country Park.
Follow the path uphill through the trees until you reach a clearing. Here on the right you find a well worn unmade path, past a large Northampton Town Council sign, forbidding visitors to interfere with the ancient monument, and pass through the tall earth ramparts to enter the enclosure.
After visiting the enclosure, exit through one of the paths which run through the trees up over the ramparts and ditches on the far side of the enclosure, to reach a wide bridleway path which runs along the outer edge of the fortifications.
Turn left upon reaching this path and follow it through the trees until you reach an underpass on the edge of the country park.
Walk through the underpass and pick up a path on the left which leads out onto the side of the busy Towcester Road.
Once on Towcester Road turn left and begin walking downhill from Hunsbury back towards Northampton town centre. You soon see the Carlsberg Brewery on the edge of the town centre in the near distance.
Almost level with the brewery, turn left and follow the road over a bridge across the Grand Union Canal and the River Nene, and through a cluster of retail parks to approach the station again.
Back on the edge of the town centre turn left to reach the station.
This is where the walk ends.
Getting Back
From Northampton Station it is possible to catch trains north towards the West Midlands conurbation and the North West beyond that and south towards Milton Keynes and London. These are half hourly throughout the day. Buses from Northampton head north towards Market Harborough and Leicestershire, and east as far as Peterborough, as well as to destinations right across Northamptonshire.